On Friday 28 October 2005 06:47, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Oct 28, 2005, at 12:14, John Szakmeister wrote:
> >> In my ~9 months of reading this list, I've heard of dozens of
> >> instances (far too many to recall) of BDB repositories getting
> >> wedged, and a handful of instances of unrecoverable corruption,
> >> versus zero such problems with FSFS. That is to say, it is not
> >> possible for FSFS repositories to get wedged; wedging is a "feature"
> >> of BerkeleyDB. The fact that the Subversion developers have made FSFS
> >> the default as of Subversion 1.2.0 should also speak for its
> >> stability.
> >
> > What do you mean by unrecoverable corruption? If you mean that
> > people lost
> > their repositories entirely, I don't have any recollection of such
> > a thing.
> > If you mean that in order to recover and move on, they had to
> > suffer a loss
> > of history or data in a particular file, then both FSFS and BDB
> > have suffered
> > from those situations (I've recovered 4 FSFS repositories in the
> > past several
> > months). That said, at least one of the FSFS corruptions turned
> > out to be a
> > hardware related failure.
>
> I recall a couple messages on the list where people were unable to
> get their BDB repositories working again using the recovery tools
> Subversion and BDB provide, and they opted to go back to a previous
> backup; perhaps these would have been manually recoverable by someone
> with the necessary expertise. I also recall other messages from
> people who had sought said manual recovery, and then no follow-up
> appeared indicating that all was well again; perhaps we can assume,
> though, that these people ended up having their repositories more or
> less successfully restored, since they probably would have mentioned
> it to the list if they hadn't.
Right, there were a few who did opt to go with a backup. I think that was
more a concern of timeliness, and potential issues in letting someone else
have access to the repository than being unrecoverable though. Those I've
contacted in the past where very concerned about giving someone access to
their repository (proprietary information and the like), so most resorted to
using a good backup and then loading in the remaining commits from peoples'
working copies. In the few instances that someone has been willing to give
access to their repository, or is willing to sit down and walk through a few
things, I've been able to get their repositories up and running again without
much issue. *shrug* I think it's hard to draw any conclusions about what
we've seen so far.
I do agree that FSFS is a simple, and reliable way to go though.
-John
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Received on Fri Oct 28 13:08:28 2005